Death—and After? eBook

Some writers, again, use Elementary as a synonym for
Shell, and so cause increased confusion. The
word should at least be restricted to the desire body
plus lower Manas, whether that lower Manas be
disentangling itself from the kamic elements, in order
that it may be re-absorbed into its source, or separated
from the Higher Ego, and therefore on the road to
destruction.

DEVACHAN.

Among the various conceptions presented by the Esoteric
Philosophy, there are few, perhaps, which the Western
mind has found more difficulty in grasping than that
of Devachan, or Devasthan, the Devaland, or land of
the Gods.[27] And one of the chief difficulties has
arisen from the free use of the words illusion, dream-state,
and other similar terms, as denoting the devachanic
consciousness—­a general sense of unreality
having thus come to pervade the whole conception of
Devachan. When the Eastern thinker speaks of the
present earthly life as Maya, illusion, dream, the
solid Western at once puts down the phrases as allegorical
and fanciful, for what can be less illusory, he thinks,
than this world of buying and selling, of beefsteaks
and bottled stout. But when similar terms are
applied to a state beyond Death—­a state
which to him is misty and unreal in his own religion,
and which, as he sadly feels, is lacking in all the
substantial comforts dear to the family man—­then
he accepts the words in their most literal and prosaic
meaning, and speaks of Devachan as a delusion in his
own sense of the word. It may be well, therefore,
on the threshold of Devachan to put this question
of “illusion” in its true light.

In a deep metaphysical sense all that is conditioned
is illusory. All phenomena are literally “appearances”,
the outer masks in which the One Reality shows itself
forth in our changing universe. The more “material”
and solid the appearance, the further is it from Reality,
and therefore the more illusory it is. What can
be a greater fraud than our body, so apparently solid,
stable, visible and tangible? It is a constantly
changing congeries of minute living particles, an
attractive centre into which stream continually myriads
of tiny invisibles, that become visible by their aggregation
at this centre, and then stream away again, becoming
invisible by reason of their minuteness as they separate
off from this aggregation. In comparison with
this ever-shifting but apparently stable body how much
less illusory is the mind, which is able to expose
the pretensions of the body and put it in its true
light. The mind is constantly imposed on by the
senses, and Consciousness, the most real thing in us,
is apt to regard itself as the unreal. In truth,
it is the thought-world that is the nearest to reality,
and things become more and more illusory as they take
on more and more of a phenomenal character.